Dear [Name Of Graduate Student]
We are writing to you because you are studying one of the following things: visual design, interaction design, service design, design research, design strategy, business, or some kind of crazy hybrid or intersection. You recently expressed interest in seeing how your skills could be wielded to design great products and services.
Do we ever have an opportunity for you! Adaptive Path is seeking graduate students with your unique combination of skills (and charm) for our internship program this summer!
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Tired of going with the design that will survive the organization's political gauntlet? What if we made decisions based on what actually worked for customers and produced results, not what snaggletoothed solution fit into every stakeholder's personal view of the world?
A quick story of how I got hooked
Five years ago I was working to redesign a major website when our team got stuck on just how to design landing pages for traffic coming through Google. Should we be satisfied with a Google searcher just viewing one page or should we put design effort into getting them to view more?
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Last week I posted about how businesses over-invest in advertising and under-invest in the improvement of the service experience, which creates what I call a Service Anticipation Gap, or SAG. Customers are falsely led to expect a service that's better than what it can be. The result is wasted ad spend and revenue losses from customer (dis)engagement.
The Challenge
Businesses have gotten used to confidently connecting spending on ads and seeing the returns in revenue. Or as @odannyboy overheard, “Advertising is a lazy man's monetization.”
And here's where the folks that plan and design services have stumbled. We haven't been able to make the same connections between investments and results that make an investment decision in good service design a no-duh. The efforts to improve services haven't historically met with the same financial success as ad spends, and therefore business lack the confidence to spend on it. Confidence is lost because coordinating systems and people with a vision of how the service really should be isn't as easy as pumping out ads via a partner agency.
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Let's be clear on this point: There would be no Adaptive Path without Peter Merholz. Certainly, after nearly 11 years in business, the company's culture, strategy, and creative direction has been influenced by a lot of folks. But Peter was the one who brought together the original founders to talk about ways we could work together, a conversation that turned into a company.
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Has a commercial ever brought you to tears? Images of families reconnecting in an airport or a child hugging their parent with delight because a service was able to bring together a magic moment? I think we've all seen some wet eyes resulting from a well crafted 30-second ad spot.
How about tears brought about from an actual service? Or someone jumping in the air with joy because of how great that check-in process was? Nada. It's a rare, rare bird.
But what if—WHAT IF—services were just as good as they were advertised to be? What if they were even close? Wouldn't that be a shocker? Or OMG, wouldn't that be an incredible business!
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We realize that our blog is turning into something of an events platform, but, really, we cannot contain ourselves. We are programming UX Week 2012 (which will be our 10th!), taking place August 21-24 in San Francisco, and we're excited to announce three keynote speakers: Stefan Sagmeister, danah boyd, and Jensen Harris.
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Freaky, the Scary Snowman.
Increasing game immersion by reducing the UI in Skyrim.
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis recently launched a new website that’s a model for other museums to use as a means to extend the experience beyond their walls.
Stop competing to be the best.
“Address is Approximate”. A brilliant stop motion video from Tom Jenkins.
Ice Cube celebrates the Eames.
When you take the friction away from sharing, you also remove the value.
During this season of office holiday parties, here are a couple of guides to get you through yours and remain among the ranks of the employed.
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Every year at this time we get a little giddy. For the Adaptive Path events team and all of our colleagues who help program, participate and promote, it marks a super busy time when we have all three of our major events in full planning mode. The gears are cranking on UX Week, MX: Managing Experience and UX Intensive and we've got some big savings now for next year's conferences and workshops.
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In support of the adverb!
A roundup of maps to check out after you read Chris Risdon's Anatomy of an Experience Map.
Design is becoming a competitive advantage for startups.
A curriculum of toys.
Smell-o-vision? Olly is a “web connected smelly robot” that converts digital alerts into smells. Apparently we need this.
What does a transformational 21st Century school look like?
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Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It's becoming increasingly useful to gain insight in order to orchestrate service touchpoints over time and space.
But I still see a dearth of quality references. When someone asks me for examples, the only good one I can reference is nForm's published nearly two years ago. However, I believe their importance exceeds their prevalence.
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